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EN 301 549

EN 301 549 ("Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services") is the European standard for digital accessibility. When EU law requires something digital to be accessible, this is the standard that defines what "accessible" means - regulations such as the EU Web Accessibility Directive, the European Accessibility Act, and the UK's PSBAR all point to it.

It covers far more than the web: separate chapters address hardware, software, support services, web pages (Clause 9), and - most relevant to PDFs - Clause 10, "Non-web documents."

Clause 10 is applied to documents. Its numbering makes the relationship explicit: clause 10.1.1.1 is WCAG's 1.1.1, clause 10.1.4.3 is criterion 1.4.3, and so on. A few web-only criteria (such as those about navigating between sets of pages) are marked not applicable for documents; the rest carry over essentially verbatim. So for a PDF, meeting EN 301 549 means meeting WCAG's document-applicable success criteria - same requirements, European letterhead.

Version numbers are editions of the EN document itself, not WCAG versions. The current edition, v3.2.1 (2021), incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA; a revised edition tracking WCAG 2.2 is in development for the European Accessibility Act. When Silktide grades a document under an EU regulation, the "EN 301 549" verdict is a WCAG verdict presented under the name the regulation uses.

Note that EN 301 549 does not require . PDF/UA is the separate engineering standard for how an accessible PDF file is constructed; EN 301 549 defines the outcomes a document must provide. A well-constructed PDF/UA file is the standard route to meeting them.

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EN 301 549 | Silktide Help